The Key to Getting a Good Night’s Sleep
Do you have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep? Dr. Hotze discusses the history of sleep and the benefits of melatonin and cortisol for sleep. Discover helpful tips to help you get more restful sleep without the use of pharmaceutical drugs.
Podcast Transcription
Stacey B.: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I’m Stacey Bandfield here with Dr. Steven Hotze, founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. So glad you’re joining us today. And as a reminder, you can always go online to HotzePodcast.com, that’s H-O-T-Z-E Podcast.com to download all of our helpful and informative, well everything you want to know about health, it’s here on these podcasts. So glad you’re with us and we’ve got a really good topic today, one that I think that people would like to know more information about because, gosh, what’s one of the top problems that people have? I would say it’s sleep. And when you listen to any of the, oh I don’t know, anybody’s talking about health and how to improve your health, sleep always seems to be playing a role. Like you’ve got to get more sleep, got to get more sleep. Well, how do you do that, Dr. Hotze?
Dr. Hotze: Well, that’s a great question. Sleep is caused by darkness. When the sun goes down, people would normally go to sleep, back in the old days before they had night clubs and bars and all that, TV…Well, there’s a gland in the middle of the brain, a little bitty gland the size of about a pea or a bean called the pineal gland. The pineal gland produces a natural sleep hormone called melatonin. Melatonin is produced by the pineal gland when things get dark. Historically, long before lights and lanterns, we’re talking about men living 500, 600, 1,000 years ago, living out on the plains when they didn’t have light other than a fire. They maybe had a fireplace outside and they lived in a teepee or a tent. When it became dark, people went to sleep because the pineal gland begins to secrete melatonin.
Now, in modern society with electricity, with computers and iPhones and all that, as long as those are on, the pineal gland does not secrete melatonin. And so people tend to stay up later and then when they go to bed, at 12:00 pm or 1:00 pm, they haven’t secreted enough melatonin and then they can’t get to sleep and then once they get to sleep, they have a hard time waking up. They’re extremely tired because they’ve got their hormonal clock upside down. They’ve got their hormones not being produced at the right time, they don’t have the normal variation in their sleep hormones and their adrenal hormones that work together. When a person secretes melatonin, they go to sleep and you produce low levels of cortisol. In the morning when you wake up, when the sun comes up, you wake up, you quit secreting melatonin, you start secreting cortisol.
It’s a diurnal variation that people have. There’s a rhythmic system to our hormones and when you don’t secret melatonin…and this happens as you age. As people age, they don’t secret melatonin.
Stacey B.: It declines I think in the mid 40s-
Dr. Hotze: It declines dramatically. I said they don’t secrete…they secrete lower and lower amounts, so they don’t sleep well. So, just like with any other hormone, what’s the solution? Well, why don’t we give them a sleep medication, pharmaceutical-
Stacey B.: Oh, I know. Lunesta.
Dr. Hotze: Oh, let’s give them Lunesta or let’s give them Ambien. Let’s give a benzodiazepine. Let’s give them an antidepressant if they can’t sleep.
Stacey B.: That’s the answer.
Dr. Hotze: Let’s give them a drug. Nobody has poor sleep because they have low levels of sleep medication or anti-anxiety medication or antidepressant medication. That’s a preposterous assumption made by the pharmaceutical companies. It’s not even an assumption. They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re using drugs to drug you up to make money. They know good and well that melatonin is a natural sleep hormone and it’s inexpensive. It’s natural. It can’t be patented.
What do I recommend at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center? What do I take? I take melatonin at bedtime. I have Dr. Hotze’s Sleep Formula that has melatonin, 5-HTP and some other natural herbs that help us sleep or you can just take plain melatonin. Sometimes I just take plain melatonin, two or four milligrams at bedtime. And, I go sound asleep. And I know I sleep well because I dream. And that’s real sleep and I know it.
Now, why is sleep important? Well, it’s obvious. You’ve got to rejuvenate yourselves and your body. You’ve got to give your brain a time to rest…it’s kind of like your computer, everything begins, comes into sync. You go from beta waves to alpha waves to theta waves and then you go to your delta waves. Those are brain waves. Beta waves are what you have when you’re highly active and thinking about a lot of different things, almost like being ADD, you’ve got all these things going on in your world and your brain’s going 100 miles an hour. Then you come down into the delta phase and the theta phase and then you go all the way into…I’m sorry, you go from beta to alpha to theta into the delta phase. And that’s the deep sleep.
Another key way that can help you sleep is doing BrainTap. We’ve talked about that – Dr. Patrick Porter.
Stacey B.: Absolutely.
Dr. Hotze: BrainTap. Google that. You can get BrainTap. Go online and get BrainTap and plug that in and that will give you some music that will put you into a sleep mode and also some very positive affirmations that Dr. Porter uses that will give you sound asleep. I put that on and I’m gone in five or ten minutes. I’m just gone, sound asleep. It’s important to get sleep. People don’t sleep well because as they age their melatonin goes down. The second reason they don’t sleep well is they’re watching TV and watching their computer and their iPhones when their…which causes their brain, not their pineal gland, not to produce melatonin. When they don’t produce melatonin, they don’t go to sleep.
And then when they finally do go to sleep, the melatonin comes on early in the morning and then they end up sleeping until the sun comes up and they don’t get enough sleep at that time. And they’re groggy all day long and their body hasn’t rejuvenated. So, if you want to be healthy and well, it’s real simple. Sleep well. You want to sleep well, make sure you take some melatonin. We carry it at the Hotze Vitamin Store. We have melatonin. We have Dr. Hotze’s Sleep Formula. I recommend both of them. I’ve used them. Our guests use them with great success. If you want to sleep well, get yourself some melatonin.
Stacey B.: That’s right. It is very easy. All you have to do, you can either go to HotzeVitamins.com. That’s HotzeVitamins.com or you can give us a call at 1-800-579-6545. That’s 1-800-579-6545. Dr. Hotze always says, “Everybody needs a health coach.” That was little bit of coaching, health coaching for the day.
Dr. Hotze: That’s right.
Stacey B.: Thank you for joining us here today at Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.
